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Author: Dimgba Igwe
Posted to the web: 7/8/2005 5:47:31 AM

This is possibly President Olusegun Obasanjo’s finest moment. But it is also arguably his worst, even at the risk of spoiling a good party. Contrast the dark fate of former Inspector-General of Police Tafa Balogun with the soaring fortunes of the president.
It was indeed a great moment when Nigeria’s external debts were slashed off by 60 per cent by the Paris Club, writing off a whooping $18 billion of our external debt with a promise of additional $2 billion if we handle things well. This is good news of historic proportions and nobody can take anything away from the president’s well-deserved accolades.
Even General Mohammadu Buhari, possibly Obasanjo’s worst critic who is still smarting from the political decision of the Supreme Court justices in favour of Obasanjo’s election, would grudgingly admit that this is indeed one good news from Obasanjo’s government. Yes, I admit that Obasanjo opened the doorway to external borrowing in the first place during his tenure as a military head of state. The famous Murtala/Obasanjo regime of which Obasanjo held the fort for four years, inherited an economy which was awash with cash. Under General Gowon’s regime, the question was not how to get money but what to do with money as Gowon was famously quoted as saying. A naira then was equivalent to almost two dollars and certainly at par with the now pompous pound sterling. Nigeria could afford anything and indeed at the height of our national hubris, we paid the salaries of workers in a poor Carribean nation that was in arrears in paying the nation’s public servants. To his credit, Gowon embarked on gigantic construction of road network, including the various overhead bridges to decongest the Lagos traffic. The Arab-Israeli conflict had fueled energy crisis with Nigeria earning at times, as much as $40 billion in a year from oil. At the peak, oil prices went to an all time high of $42 per barrel then. This was considered unprecedented then. This point is worth noting if only because, today, oil prices have finally shot to over $60 mark and our earnings from oil is now in excess of $45 billion per annum. You could say that unlike Buhari and the early part of Babangida regime when the nation’s total oil income was at times less than $10 billion—in fact, less than $7 billion in 1985 when Babangida overthrew Buhari—Obasanjo is swimming in dollars. Lucky man! The point was that Obasanjo’s regime in 1978 reversed Nigeria’s status in IMF from a lending nation to a borrowing nation when we took a jumbo IMF loan. That was the beginning. There is essentially nothing wrong in borrowing if you know what to do with the loan—let’s say, borrowing to invest in viable projects that could generate direct or indirect returns to service the loans. But, unfortunately, in the most part, we borrowed to service our greed, kleptomania and excessive consumption. Shagari’s extremely profligate regime, riding on Obasanjo’s foundation, compounded our debt situation with bogus trade debts which nobody till date has been able to account for. It is now well known that a large portion of whatever we borrowed was salted away through various seedy channels back to the secret bank vaults of the various nations that made up the Paris Club, leaving us with the rough and ugly end of the stick—astronomical and crippling debt burden that has left our economy, as that of most other debt-riddled African nations, prostrate. This background is a necessary context to the present breakthrough of Obasanjo’s regime for which everyone is rightly rolling out the drums. It is arguable that Nigeria is probably reaping from the wealth of experience, connections and expertise of Obasanjo’s technocrats like the finance minister, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala whose name opens doors in the international finance circuit; Professor Charles Soludo, who used the platform of his African Institute for Applied Economics to sensitize the world about Nigeria’s debt trap and of course, the astute negotiation skills of Director-General of the Debt Management Office, Dr. Mansur Muhtar. But certainly, Obasanjo deserves the kudos not only for appointing such adroit technocrats in the first place and backing them to the hilt in the face of the various political pressures that would have swept them away, but also for pursuing his singular vision of debt forgiveness to a fruitful end. Suddenly the sin of Obasanjo’s unprecedented penchance for globetrotting now pales into insignificance in the face of debt write-off. It is hoped that $1.8 billion per annum that would have gone into servicing $18 billion write off would make a difference in the provision of vital infrastructures as the president promised in his national broadcast. And, certainly that the debt yoke that is threatening to throttle poor states like Abia State with over N90 billion debt accumulated by past regimes from Mbakwe administration in the old Imo State to the various military regimes that have ravaged the state, would be substantially reduced to give Governor Orji Kalu additional revenue to plough into the development of the state. But the debt write-off is not the end of Obasanjo’s run of good fortune. His controversial re-election has now been validated by the Supreme Court, but this in my view, is not surprising. As many people believe, the Supreme Court judgment is more political than legal. It would probably have amounted to insanity to nullify the presidential election now—after two years—despite the abundant flaws in the conduct and plunging the nation into the unknown. The issues before the Supreme Court justices were not so much that of electoral malpractices and legalism as that of how to preserve the fragile national stability. In terms of substance, it is obvious to anybody that even if there were no good legal grounds to sustain the president’s election, the learned justices would have had to invent some to sustain the system rather than contemplate the unknown. In the end, it is not so much triumph of democracy as the president enthused or triumph of rule of law for that matter, but triumph of hardheaded realism resolved in favour of the sitting president.For Obasanjo, that was another cause for celebration, even if his dream of receiving the golden trophy of the World Youth Soccer tournament was truncated by an evil referee. Maybe the gods of soccer probably thought that it was unfair for the president to reap where he did not sow!Now the bad times. I cannot recall, in living memory, the last time security men were so blatantly brutal in the open as they displayed on Wednesday when Tafa Balogun, the former IGP, was so brazenly assaulted. It was perhaps, the worst advertisement for Nigerian democracy coming at a time we were doing our best to impress the west to justify our quest for debt reprieve and election to UN Security Council. The former super cop was not only thrown out of a moving car, landing with his massive frame on a hard concrete, his leg was also run over by the car, convincing the former IGP that death was around the corner. Is this the Nigerian police which Balogun left behind or fifth columnists out to embarrass the government—the president, the EFCC et al? A cheeky fellow informs me that the cops that brutalized Balogun were from the killer squad the former IGP left behind, that in his days of glory, Balogun was no less brutal to his enemies, that the cops were not only out for vendetta of sorts against the former IGP for sundry reasons, they were serving Balogun with a dose of his own medicine. Whether this is true or not is beside the point. In my view, there is a big leadership lesson at stake here. Whatever anybody may say, I consider it a huge indictment of Balogun’s legacy in the police that there are cops, his former staff, who hate him—their former boss—so much that they prefer to have his body shredded on the hot and hard tarmac. So, what did Balogun do to his former officers left in the force? Any lesson here for those still serving in leadership positions today? At the end of the day, as the famous Zik of Africa told his kinsman, Dr. Ukpabi Asika, no condition is permanent, truly.Just as the president deserves the kudos for his success at the debt forgiveness campaign, so he must take responsibility for what the police did to Balogun. In other words, Balogun is advertisement of the level of human rights abuses under Obasanjo’s dispensation. The other day, Audu Ogheh, then chairman of the ruling PDP was forced, allegedly at gunpoint right inside the bowel of Aso Rock, to resign his position as demanded by the president. Today, it is a former IGP being dragged through the street in a moving vehicle right inside the court premises. In effect, the texture of any democracy ultimately draws from the temperament of the leader at the helms. In that respect, Nigerian democracy of today is Obasanjo personified.